“Show’s over,” growled the dwarf. “You’ve agitated my virgin missus. En’t that enough trouble for one day?” He began to slap up the hinged stages and secure the shutters. “We gave it a chance, and it’s paid us with a scrap of useless history. Who cares if that friable Cat once worked for ye olde Wizard of Oz? He’s long gone, and it’s Emperor Shell on the throne now. All that bunk of espionage and assault is ancient history and does no one any good, least of all the Cat, with its fragmented tail.”

The Clock disobeyed the dwarf and clattered its central stage open again.

“Huffy, are we?” said the dwarf. “Feeling our oats, eh? This is a strange turn of affairs.” But he backed off a little, nonplussed.

“Look,” said Brrr.

“Easy for you to say,” replied Yackle, tapping one dead eyelid with her fingernail.

The Clock’s machinery chirred with a sound like the tumbling of oaken dice. The hands of the dwarf fell at his side, but remained fisted, as if Mr. Boss would strike the equipment if it dared an impertinent display. Brrr shifted to get a better view. Ilianora and the boys watched, too.

Through a mist that suffused the stage from vents in the flooring, a tall figure emerged. It stood about ten inches high. It sported a long white beard and a tall velvet hat-like a witch’s hat but without the brim. The face was indistinct but furrowed with character; it looked like the business end of a pair of socks folded into each other. The face seemed pinched between the downward cone of the white beard and the upward cone of the black velvet cap. Stars and moons were picked out on the old gentleman’s robe.

“What’s happening?” asked Yackle. “This is no time to fall silent, you lot.”

“Sorry,” said Brrr, and he began to describe what he saw.

In his arms the figure hugged an oversize volume, a folio of russet leather clasping vellum pages of irregular cut. Oversize, proportionally speaking, of course: in actuality, the prop was about the heft of a roast-wren sandwich.

The figure set the book down on the ground. He looked to the left and to the right, as if checking to make sure he was alone. Then, alarmingly, he looked at the small audience and winked at them. It was almost salacious. Brrr felt in the presence of rough magic.

“It’s a book,” said Brrr. “A magic book, I bet.”

“The Grimmerie,” added Ilianora. “I knew it in my youth, back at Kiamo Ko.”

“The Grimmerie,” replied Yackle. “As I suspected. What about it?”

Brrr and Ilianora took turns describing the scene. The figure opened the cover of the book. It was only a simulacrum of a book, not a real book: its pages were not more than five inches square, if that. When the book was opened flat, at a central section of pages so the versos and rectos spread evenly in each direction, the bearded puppet made some arcane gestures above the gutter of the volume. He let his beard trail along the stitchery, which seemed a nearly obscene gesture, certainly an odd one. Then he curled his fingers up and lifted his gnarled hands-Brrr could tell his hands were gnarled even though they were papier-mâché puppet hands. He knitted a spell with his fingers. It was as if, Brrr thought, he were writing in the air above the book. “He’s…he’s conjuring something out of the book.”